Edward Snowden turns out to be just the hero for our age. Getting condemned as a traitor by former (and by the evidence, maybe permanent) Power Behind the Throne Dick Cheney is a real feather in his cap. I wish I could be condemned as a traitor by Dick Cheney. Imagine how great a country would be if if it were governed entirely by people who Dick Cheney would call Traitor.

What they are not telling us is that the reason they only need the "metadata" from the phone companies is not that they respect anyone's privacy. It's that they already have all the audio logged, going back years; but they need the metadata to know who's talking. They got tired of asking the phone companies for metadata on bits they had tagged as interesting, and just demanded the lot.

I bought a Sandisk "Extreme Pro" SDHC card, advertised as supporting "up to 90 MB/s" reads and writes, to use in my Wandboard. Copying a 2.5G image onto it, I got all of 11 MB/s. I guess they only guarantee that it won't go over 90 MB/s, and maybe blow out my SD socket. Thoughtful of them.